Quotes About Literature

Bien, Bourrienne; tú también serás inmortal. ¿Por qué, general Bonaparte? ¿No eres mi secretario? Dígame cómo se llamaba el de Alejandro. Mmm... no está mal, Bourrienne.

Por qué el Escritor a veces parece admirar el Ulises aún más cuando piensa en él que cuando efectivamente lo lee?

A dead writer often finds himself at the mercy of something other than friends.

Their house had real hard-cover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

If a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming what might be called a tapeworm.

If you read an essay in Esquire and don't like it, there could be something wrong with the essay. If it's in The New Yorker, on the other hand, and you don't like it, there's something wrong with you.

The writers she prefers are long dead and are on the wordy side. If the novel on the sofa is 700 pages long, and the author photo is an engraving, it's either hers or Hugh's.

If something is written in your native language and it's taking you half a year to get through it, unless you're being paid by the hour to read it, I'd say there's a problem.

always try to read form as content, style as meaning.

Writers who complain most vociferously about the way their work has been pigeonholed because of a particular personal attribute—their race, say, or sexual orientation, or even their physical beauty—are always the writers whose work (the reception to whose work) has most directly benefited from this attribute.

593 Still (very still), at the heart of "literary culture" is the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers, the run-of-the-mill four-hundred-page page-turner. Amazingly, people continue to want to read that.

He seemed quite a cheerful fellow, too. Even puckish, you might say—at least if, like Brice, you had just recently encountered the term and been taken by it, but hadn't yet read enough literature to realize that puckish was by no means the same thing as harmless.

I'm not so much interested in creating literature as I am in trying to convey the pressure of what I've witnessed or experienced. Writing and rewriting until one achieves a literary form, a strict form, just bleeds the life from a experience-no blood left is it isn't raw. How do we talk, how do we think not in novellas or paragraphs but in associations, in sometimes disjointed currents.

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.

Alliteration seems to offend people.

I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch.

Shakespeare again. Once you let him into your head, he takes up tenancy and will not leave.

Considering that the modern and contemporary literature taught in most universities is largely bleak, cynical, morbid, pessimistic, misanthropic dogmatism, often written by suicidal types who sooner or later kill themselves with alcohol or drugs, or shotguns, Professor Takuda was a remarkably cheerful man.

To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.

There are two ways that you can learn about the world. You can travel or you can read.

That is the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times, . . . it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way, we are the wiser, we are existentially thicker.

Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire.

Pasaban los años,y la única persona que no cambiaba era la joven de su libro